Female Domestic Workers: Between Subordination and Negotiation in Peripheral Modernization.Córdoba (Argentina), 1910-1930

Abstract

One of the main purposes of this paper is to rescue the leading role of female domestic workers during Argentina’s modernization period in the first decades of the 20th century. The objective is to recover the image of such workers as active subjects, focusing on their actions, experiences and relations. Therefore, the purpose is to do research on domestic work as a space for experience and relation exchange (between employers and domestic workers) within a daily life context. The main hypothesis of this paper indicates that in a process of transformation of domestic work into a trading commodity at the end of the 19th century brought about increasing weakening of the traditional employer control over female domestic workers; decrease of subordination conditions of female domestic workers to give way to increasing levels of freedom and negotiation of privileges with their employers. The domestic workers strike held in 1929 in a city of the province of Córdoba is an exceptional event that can be regarded as a clear, and still spectacular, of this process. This Research is based on the review of police reports, op-eds, editorials and some announcements and letters to the editor appearing in the press.